正文 · AI 翻译
Thanks to IT Home reader 乌蝇哥的左手 for the tip!
IT Home reported on November 5 that Bloomberg published an article today (November 5) saying Apple is cutting its internal budget for employees’ use of artificial intelligence tools to curb rapidly rising AI usage costs.
The report said Apple hopes to integrate AI more deeply into research and development, engineering, and daily operations to improve efficiency, but as AI usage costs continue to rise, the company has begun setting stricter limits on the tokens employees consume when using AI models.
People familiar with the matter said that last month (October 2026), Apple lowered the daily AI spending limit for some engineers by 33%, from $300 (IT Home note: approximately 2,005 yuan at the current exchange rate) to $200 (approximately 1,337 yuan at the current exchange rate). It also plans further cuts for some engineering teams, potentially to as little as $100 a day (approximately 668.4 yuan at the current exchange rate).
Some non-engineering teams already had a limit of $100 (approximately 668.4 yuan at the current exchange rate), and Apple is even considering lowering it to $25 (approximately 167.1 yuan at the current exchange rate). Employees with a genuine need for higher limits can apply to senior management for an exemption.
These budgets cover the tokens consumed when AI models process requests—units of data such as text and code. AI service providers typically charge by token usage, and more advanced models cost more; complex tasks such as writing and debugging software code are especially likely to consume large amounts of the allowance.
The report said the company is pushing to use AI to overhaul engineering processes and internal operations. Employees can use services including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini; some teams, however, have been told to switch to cheaper models or to AI solutions that can run locally on devices.
The change also reflects a broader shift in the technology industry: companies are moving from encouraging employees to experiment extensively with AI to carefully calculating costs and returns. Microsoft has likewise tightened internal AI spending. Tesla has set a weekly limit of $200 (approximately 1,337 yuan at the current exchange rate) on employees’ AI spending, Uber limits monthly usage of a single AI coding tool to $1,500 (approximately 10,026 yuan at the current exchange rate), and Meta has introduced token budgets and encouraged employees to use its own tools.